Click here to edit title.

Click here to edit title.

On August 22nd, the Sistahs on the Reading Edge book club boarded
the Napa Valley Wine Train in Antioch, California, to celebrate the birthday of
one of their members. Too many toasts, appetizers and good cheer caused other
passengers to complain to the conductor that the women were too noisy. On the
pretext of relocating the group, the train conductor "paraded" the black
women through six train cars to an empty area. At the St. Helena station, however,
police boarded the train and escorted the black women to the St. Helena police
department. Afterwards, a spokesperson for the Napa Valley Wine Train Corporation
apologized to the members of the black women's book club, though, in the corporation’s
“official” statement, the train corporation noted that the women’s behavior caused
them to be ejected. The behavior the
tour spokesperson referenced was #Reading
While Black.

Penalizing
black women for publicly flaunting their reading habits has its roots in the
centuries-old practice of book burning. Historically repressive regimes have burned
books to limit the information available to the masses. Some of the more infamous
incidents of book burning include:

Qin
Dynasty Burned Books in the Second Century B.C.

Emperor Qin founder of a dynasty that ruled China from 476 BC to 221
BC, burned a great many philosophical
treatises at the academy of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Along with burning the
books, Qin ordered the five hundred Confucian scholars familiar with the books
buried alive.

Female Pharaoh Erased From History

Queen
Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, had her
memorials, stone monuments, stelae and even her funerary images systematically disfigured and erased.
Egyptologists blame a vindictive Thutmoses IV, but the evidence is that whoever
tried to remove Hatshepsut from history was really covering up her inauguration
of the Egyptian solar cult.

Burning of Library of
Alexandria

The ancient Library of
Alexandria was burned destroying a vast number of books and scrolls. The
culprits believed responsible for the book burning are Julius Caesar in 48 BC
and Aurelian in 274 AD. In 391 AD, Pope Theophilus burned the Temple of Serapis
to the ground. This temple housed books and scrolls salvaged from the Library
of Alexandria.

Burning
of Arian Books

In 215 AD, Emperor
Constantine ordered all books dealing with the Arian heresy burned. Constantine
also ordered burned anything written on any subject by Arius, a Christian
priest from Egypt. Arius and his followers conducted missionary work among the
Germanic tribes. He converted Vandals, Goths and Huns from barbarism to
Christianity by incorporating ancient Germanic rituals into their Christian
worship. Arius documented his work in several writings. Constantine ordered anyone reading or even
possessing any of Arius’ writings burned as well. In 587 Recared, the first
Catholic king of Spain, ordered a systematic search for all books by Arius. The
books and those possessing them were burned. The Arian takeover of the Catholic
Church __ a takeover that Emperor Julian did not complete until the ninth
century ___ was accomplished in complete secrecy.

Burning of Jewish Manuscripts

In 1244, twenty-four carriage loads
of Talmuds and other Jewish religious manuscripts were set on fire in the
streets of Paris. In the 1930s German storm troopers organized regular book
burnings throughout Germany including works by such famous Jews as Thomas Mann,
Marcel Proust and Karl Marx.

New York Society For
The Suppression Of Vice

The New York Society For The
Suppression Of Vice, founded in 1873, inscribed book burning on its seal. The
society abhorred lewd writings and pictures. The society burned 15 tons of
books, 284,000 pounds of printing plates, and 4,000,000 pictures. Recognizing
the society’s work, Congress passed the Comstock Law, named for the society’s founder,
making lewdness a crime.

William Reich: A Strange Book Burning

In 1956, a federal judge ordered over
six tons of books by William Reich burned. William Reichwas an Austrian-born Jew
and author of several influential books ___ including The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution. He moved from Germany to New York in 1939. In
1950, following critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper's,
a U.S attorney obtained an injunction against Reich’s literature. In 1956 Reich
was charged with contempt for having violated the injunction against selling
his books. Reich was sentenced to two
years' imprisonment, and six tons of his publications were burned. In 1957, though
he had escaped a German death camp, William Reich died in American prison.

The Sistahs on the Reading Edge book club
were not reading authors as subversive as William Reich, but there must have been
some reason that reading while black
threatened the whites on the Napa Valley Wine Train that day. Some metrics
might provide a clue to this mystery.

In
2008, the African-American Book Club’s five best selling fiction books wereZane’s Purple Panties and Succulent: Chocolate
Flava II as well astheTeri Woods’ trilogy. True to the Game I, II & III. The
African American Book Club’s five top selling non-fiction
books in 2008 were Dear G-Spot: Straight
Talk About Sex & Love by Zane, two books by Karrine Steffans, The Confessions of A Video Vixen and The Vixen Diaries. The fourth best
selling African American non fiction book wasTerrance’s Hiding In Hip Hop: On The Down Low in the Entertainment Industry.
The number five best selling non fiction book in the African American market
was Barack Obama’s The Audacity
of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. Perhaps whites feared that blacks might be reading
books by multi-cultural authors, like Barack Obama. With the upcoming 2016
elections driving white paranoia over anything black, it may have been a white
knee jerk reaction against literate blacks, just as the treatment of James
Blake by white New York cops was a reaction against “uppity” half-breeds.

Whites have
always feared a literate black population. During slavery it was a crime for
blacks to read. More, recently prominent multi-cultural authors have endured government under
surveillance. The US government continually monitored James Baldwin’s movements
when he lived in Europe. Just recently, the FBI disclosed that the agency kept Gabriel
Garcia Marquez under constant surveillance while the Nobel prize winning author
lived in New York. So even if black book clubs began improving the level of
their reading material, the government would immediately be alerted and take
action. Certain books might become difficult If not impossible to find. Two multi-cultural
authors ____ Frank Yerby and Carlos Castaneda ___ might suddenly find their books in a
government incinerator.

Frank Yerby: Multi-Cultural Canon
and Genre

Frank Yerby a black man and born in Augusta, Georgia,
created the most important canon of multicultural thought in the twentieth
century. Though emigrating to Europe, Yerby’s canon of work bursts with secrets
previously hidden from the general public. Already a copy of Yerby’s, A Darkness At Ingraham’s Crest, a sequel
to his wildly popular The Dahomean,
sells for up to $500. Yerby wrote his canon of work using a unique literary
genre, the costume novel. He “masks”
his historical revelations concerning political ideologies, social movements
and class antagonisms as his assemblage of heroes, anti-heroes and ordinary
individuals are swept up in adventures of historic proportions. Yerby’s costume
novel is a triumph of multi-cultural thought over racist cant. He tells lays
out historical facts instead of white supremacist ideology. Yerby’s last book, McKensie’s Hundred, is a treasure trove
of information about secret societies, European and American. In one of his
last interviews given to a journalist with a news magazine in Madrid, Yerby
hints at the power of his canon for multi-cultural readers:

“If there is something
I don’t believe in, it is a victim’s guilt. When the Jews stopped being
victims, the world learned to respect them.”
1998 Frank Yerby Interview in El
Pais Seminal newspaper

Castaneda’s Revives Toltec Warrior Spirit

The wisdom found in the
writings of Carlos Castaneda is a revival of Toltec wisdom. The Toltec were not
a race like the Aztecs or Mayans; they were sorcerers and warriors. Each Toltec
was recruited as an apprentice an initiated onto the path of knowledge. The
Toltec studied nature, explored the human mind and dreamed “separate
realities.” Two thousand years ago, the
Toltec built wondrous cities. The Toltec capitol city, Teotihuacán, located just
north of present day Mexico City was called "the place where humans
awake and remember their divinity."

The Toltec followed the rule set forth by Quetzalcóatl whom
the Toltec portrayed most often as a “plumed serpent, ” though sometimes the
god had a human form, other times the diety was Venus, the morning star, and at
still other times Quetzalcóatl was an eagle. For millennia, the Toltec altered
their perception of the world using perceptual clues that altered their
awareness in accordance with the demands of different realities. Toltec
discovered that an infinite variety of physical entities could be created
because of the fluidity between the fundamental principles of form. These
material realities be produced by manipulating perceptual awareness.

There was a massive glow on one end
ot the line of lights where Don Juan was. I thought of the plumed serpent of
the Toltec legend. And then the lights were gone.The Eagles’s Gift, Carlos
Castaneda

Now if black book clubs
were to read and discuss any of Carlos Castaneda’s or Frank Yerby’s books ___
not to mention their being incorporated into the curricula of Black Studies
departments ___ we might see some real changes in the behavior of black people.